Peru

The Basque presence in Peru is old, urban and made up of merchants, not of a mass emigration. It begins with the conquest and takes root in the Lima of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where the Basques were among the most powerful traders and in 1612 founded their own brotherhood. It never became a large colony: after independence the country did not stand out as a destination for European immigration, and in the twentieth century the Basques who came were above all members of religious orders and missionaries. Today’s community is made up of four active centres, led by the Euskal Etxea of Lima.

The story begins with the conquest. Among the thirteen men who refused to abandon Francisco Pizarro on the Isla del Gallo was Domingo de Soraluce, from Bergara in Gipuzkoa (see Basques in Peruvian history).³

After the soldiers came the merchants. By the beginning of the seventeenth century there was already a sizeable number of Basques in Lima, and many of them belonged to the most powerful section of its traders; in 1612 they founded their brotherhood (see the Hermandad de Aránzazu (Brotherhood of Aránzazu)).¹ In the eighteenth century another sizeable number of Basque and Navarrese merchants arrived, and they played a central part in the economic life of the capital.¹

After independence few came: Peru did not stand out as a destination for European immigration.⁵ The best-known Basque episode of the nineteenth century is, in fact, an exception, that of the settlers from Gipuzkoa who reached the Talambo estate in 1860 (see Talambo).²

In the twentieth century, the Basques of Peru were above all members of religious orders and missionaries, along with a few sailors settled in El Callao and a handful of families exiled by the Spanish Civil War.⁵